Asian Legal Review

Hollywood has a fairly dismal record of taking incredibly popular Japanese anime or manga tales and transforming them into live action movies, so there is justifiable concern among fans of Kimi No Na Wa that the planned remake is going to be a pale shadow of the original when it hits the big screen. Plans for the live action version of the film – better known to audiences outside Japan as Your Name – were announced in September, with the apparent majority of hard core fans of the…

Susi Pudjiastuti shows off a copy of an application for a permit submitted one year before she was named Indonesia’s fisheries minister in 2014. Made out to an Indonesian company with an address in Fuzhou, China, it sought permission to operate a vessel capable of hauling in 3,000 tons of fish per voyage. The vessel would have operated a purse seine, a type of circular net used in commercial fishing to target dense schools of fish. The nets are controversial because they are so efficient…

Japanese cosmetics company Pola apologised on Saturday after one of its sales outlets in Japan posted a sign prohibiting entry by Chinese shoppers.
The apology was posted on the company’s website after a picture of the shop with that sign was circulated on Friday on Chinese social media. In a statement, Pola said the company had identified the shop and removed the sign, which “caused unpleasant feelings and inconvenience to many people”.
The company “takes the situation…

Rohingya refugees who return to Myanmar following a Bangladesh-Myanmar repatriation agreement will initially have to live in temporary shelters or camps, Dhaka said on Saturday.
“Primarily they will be kept at temporary shelters or arrangements for a limited time,” Bangladesh Foreign Minister A.H. Mahmood Ali told reporters in the capital Dhaka.
The United Nations says 620,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since August and now live in squalor in the world’s largest refugee…

Nepal on Sunday votes in historic elections for new national and provincial assemblies that many hope will bring much-needed stability to the desperately poor country, which has cycled through 10 leaders in the last 11 years.
The elections are the first under a new post-war constitution that paved the way for a sweeping overhaul of the political system intended to devolve power away from a top-heavy central government to seven newly created provinces.
The constitution, adopted in 2015, is aimed…

“We speak our mind,” says the website of a group of young Cambodians who have met at weekends for the past six years to discuss politics over cups of coffee.
But discussions by the Politikoffee group were postponed indefinitely by the organisers after the main opposition party was dissolved last week at the request of authoritarian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s government.
For participants, the suspension of their meetings because of the difficult environment was just one more sign…

ANALYSIS: Although the UK Budget announced 18 new measures in relation to tax disputes and investigations, they were not all new. The most significant proposals include a new 12 year assessment time limit for offshore matters and measures to tackle VAT evasion by sellers on online marketplaces.

ANALYSIS: A stark warning has been issued to gambling operators in Britain by the industry regulator of their need to do more to ensure ‘fairer and safer’ gambling.

The length of time for which employees on maternity or parental leave will be able to pause payment of contributions into a save as you earn (SAYE) employee share scheme will increase from six to 12 months, the government has announced.

Comments around the launch of the Business and Property Courts (BPC) underline the judicial service’s commitment to high-quality commercial litigation regardless of where a case is filed in England and Wales, an expert has said.